FPP, OPP, what's the deal??

Many of you would be much more clued on with FPP developments, etc than I. My 'show computer' consists of a standard Windows PC rather than a Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone Black single-board computer. But I would like to stress one point about re-licensing FPP. First up, I am not a lawyer, nor is this legal advice, etc etc.

CaptainMurdoch at falconchristmas said:
I have started a discussion going with Dan and the other minor FPP contributors to get their input on re-licensing FPP using a little more restrictive license such as the Creative Commons BY-ND (Attribution - NoDerivative) License.
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I have used Creative Commons licensed works in the past and occasionally (although infrequently) have even licensed my own uploads under a CC type of license. In just about all these cases, these 'works' from other persons or myself have been media (pictures, video, sound) or text related. A number of media-content sites such as YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud and Flickr support licensing content uploaded to their platform under a CC type of license.

Creative Commons licenses are not intended for software and the CC organisation overtly recommends against using their licenses for this purpose: https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software
The Free Software Foundation (GPL) also discourages using the CC licenses for software, e.g. the less restrictive CC-BY version: "It should not be used on software"

One specific situation that I believe would violate a CC-BY-ND license and that you might not want to prevent is the following scenario. This is my own interpretation of the license and to reiterate, I am not a lawyer.
  1. Imaginary Joe notes a problem with CC-BY-ND licensed software that is developed through a Git cloud service (e.g. GitHub)
  2. Imaginary Joe is not one of the developers of this software and is not able to make changes to the main repository directly but would still like to contribute.
  3. In order to fix the issue himself, Imaginary Joe forks that software to his own repository (Joe's fork is an exact copy at this point, not a derivative)
  4. Imaginary Joe determines what the problem is and changes some code in their repository (Joe's fork is now a derivative copy and violates the CC-BY-ND license)
  5. After verifying that he has fixed the problem, Imaginary Joe submits a pull request back to the original repository
  6. A developer reviews the pull request and merges the changes into the original repository.
  7. The CC-BY-ND software has been improved, but not without its license terms being violated in the process.
The Free Software Foundation's site has a page listing different types of software (and other) licenses: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list#SoftwareLicenses
 
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It might've been all legal to "re-use" their open-source work in it's entirety; but it's still wasn't ethical IMO.

That said; I guess the people whom unwittingly went with a cloned board are still going to be looked after with FPP support.
 
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